Toby Harnden was the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC, from 2006 to 2011. Click here for Toby's website. Follow him on Twitter here @tobyharnden and on Facebook here. He is the author of the bestselling book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story Britain's War in Afghanistan.

Don't let the politicians turn the British press into an American-style lapdog of the Establishment

Could the politicians turn the demise of the News of the World to their own advantage?

We can see how this is all shaping up. David Cameron, a professional PR man who is a consummate master of the art of spin, is declaring that we are "all in this together" and grudgingly conceding that his friend Rebekah Brooks should be allowed to find other employment. Ed Miliband, the worm (or is it sock puppet?) that turned, is now going for Rupert Murdoch's jugular.

Excuse me for my cynicism in considering the new-found morality of these two to be somewhat suspect given they were recently both yukking it up at the News International summer party with Brooks and Murdoch, when it had long been apparent to anyone with a pulse and two brain cells to rub together that parts of their empire was up to its neck in illegality.

After years of sucking up to Murdoch, the Tories and Labour now see that it is politically expedient, even essential, for them to bite the hand that has been feeding them for so long.

The phone hacking at the News of the World was despicable and disgusting. No decent journalist or human being could think that it was somehow OK to read and delete poor Milly Dowler's voicemails. The British public is rightly outraged and wants to be assured that such perversions of journalism can never happen again.

Having done nothing for years, the politicians are now clamouring to do something, anything to show that none of this was anything to do with them. Miliband senses that if the BSkyB acquisition is approved, he has a narrative that can win him the next election. Cameron thinks that he can spin himself into the post-Blair paragon who cleaned up the dirty excesses of the press.

And it would be convenient for both men to have a press that is, shall we say, rather more respectful of politicans than has previously been the case. A press like there is here in Washington, where reporters stand for the president and feel puffed up with pride when he calls on them to ask a question (very often a pretentious, look-at-me three-parter that has little to do with getting a decent answer).

How nice it would be if, like the US, the press would dutifully write "beat sweeteners" to ingratiate themselves, where stories are not written for fear of the journalist falling out of favour, where the political and media elites attend the same cocktail parties and envelope themselves in the same stultifyingly comfortable consensus about what is happening and what should be reported on.

Of course, there is much magnificant American journalism. At it's best, it is more accurate, more comprehensive, and more serious than some of the (let's be frank) tendentious and prurient bilge you can read in some British papers.

But I like the fact that British journalists are, as Robert Shrimsley points out here, a grubby, dispreputable breed of misfits and awkward malcontents who delight in upsetting people. In America, journalism is a hallowed craft (I always laugh when I see the Journalists' Creed at the National Press Club). In Britain, it's a shabby trade.

There is a danger of an unholy alliance between: Cameron and Milliband; politicos like Alastair Campbell and John Prescott (who have their own personal agendas against News International); rivals keen to see News International titles emasculated; and sanctimonious celebs like the one-trick pony actor Hugh Grant and the ranting comic Steve Coogan. If we let them, they will capitalise on the justifiable dismay of the public to muzzle the press.

Yes, there was a failure of self-regulation by the Press Complaints Commission. But let's not forget that it was British journalists, most notably Nick Davies and his team at the Guardian, who brought Murdoch to his knees last week. The tipping point came when the Guardian revealed that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked and the Telegraph reported that the families of war dead were also targeted. Seems to me like some pretty good self-regulation there.

There were failures within journalism, certainly. There was police corruption too. But the willing participants in a morally bankrupt political culture should not be allowed to profit from the demise of the system they helped to create.

A big part of the problem was that politicians became beholden to the media – let's not allow Cameron, Miliband and Co to "solve" things by engineering a self-serving reversal.